Cannibal
by Alias Blackclaw
Summary: 'You sit on the opposite side of his desk in an uncomfortable wooden chair, in his suede shadow.' Carla/Simmons; Dark Themes


Cross posted on AO3.

* * *

Your name is Carla and your birthday is tomorrow.

Birthdays were generally lackluster for you. You never expected a cake or balloons, never had the chance to blow out a bunch of candles. Your life's been a one way bullet train climbing a mountain. You're busy, you're fast, you're productive and you know it.

You might just be- no you are- the most intelligent person Derek Simmons ever hired, and you're only seventeen.

You're seventeen and brilliant. You have a PhD in Virology, twenty one lab aides under your direction, and a boss (and you hate calling him this), that you would bend your back for. You're seventeen and he's given you all of these opportunities you would have never had otherwise. He's given you a life, a career, money, and you do what you love in a place that it completely yours. You're your own master and you're spearheading the study in retroviruses with your collected research on the parthenogenesis and application of the origin, the Progenitor.

Your coworkers, and they are mostly subordinates, hate you for it. If they even catch tail of you they're muttering about you under their breath. To them, you're too young.

It's no place for a little girl like you down in the dark with all the creepy crawlies. A majority of them are in their mid-thirties, late twenties. They've started losing hair and taking the shape of whatever swivel chair they perch themselves on 19 hours a day.

You want to argue that they haven't accomplished half as much as you, but that urge is stale by now and you've realized very quickly that "adults" don't listen unless there's a price tag or diploma involved.

Yet you had power and you had success.

And you were about to be a year older anyways.

You wake to a burst of static from your alarm clock, and you swear. What sheets were left on the bed stick to you, your dirty-colored hair sticks to you.

Were you dreaming?

You blink the sleep away, smack your hissing clock so the noise will stop.

You had to have been dreaming. Your lips are wet, you're sore. Everything has a funk to it.

Maybe you're running a fever- you guess, and the thought's enough for a shot of adrenaline. You can't miss your train- not today! You pull yourself up by sheer willpower and nothing else. Your arms feel like lead.

You kick at piles of forgotten clothes on your way to the shower.

And it feels really good under the spray of water. You scoop up your hair- you'll wash it for once and you usually let it go.

You usually don't stay at your apartment either. It's too claustrophobic- alien. You can't do anything here but stare numbly at a tv screen or play domestic and clean.

You rub your shoulders and feel the bones. You feel the dips where your skin sinks in. Your body is a patchwork of freckles and gray, and normally you wouldn't even give it a second thought. But today you do.

You wonder if you're still asleep because your head's full of drugged thoughts like it's a medley.

The water steams, you look at your long, gangly legs, and suck on your lip. Square knees, stubby toes.

Would he like your legs? They're long, nothing shapely- you don't really have curves.

You'll wear tights. Yes, red ones- he loves that color. You'll wear red- you'll tie up your hair and wear red.

You'll put on lipstick- he'll love that.

He might even kiss you.

He will.

You shiver. You open your eyes and you're not dreaming.

-o-

"Good morning," says the secretary but you barely hear her as you march past. Your heels squeak and it's obnoxious enough. You don't want her horse-whinny voice in your ear. She's annoying enough during graveyard shift- constantly breaking the silence in the lobby when you go to get a sip of water.

You breeze past to your workspace, you don't bother to say hello- you know they notice you anyways. You feel them looking at your back when you walk by- and some of them even had the gall to start whispering about you. Whenever you turn to look they have their backs to you.

They're rats and they know it.

You don't have time for petty nonsense.

So you pull a manila folder out from the rack, and a computer to resume where you left off- where was it that you left of? Right, with the first denatured culture of-

"Miss Radames."

Damn it to hell.

"Yes?"

The long-bulbed fluorescents buzz in the little pause. He's scared because you're angry. You're angry because you're pressed for time and no damn person in the establishment seems to understand the meaning of a deadline. You've never been late for anything in your life.

The man addressing you looks like a bug with huge rimmed glasses and oily hands.

"The supervisor would like to see you?"

You can't help yourself; you blurt it out, "Derek?"

You're so eager and it blooms from your voice. You've already gone through the decontamination procedures, scrubbed your hands raw and tucked your hair back in a cap, and part of you wants to ask for a few hours leeway.

But this is Derek Simmons and he isn't fond of waiting. Even on you.

"What for?" you ask, to kick any amount of excitement you might have had under the carpet.

"He didn't say."

"Alright," you say, and though it's a pain to put your developments on hold…

You go gladly.

-o-

He sits in a leather chair that squeaks when he moves.

From what you know, he's American, but he's absolutely foreign to you. You've never met a man quite like Derek Simmons. He's so clean, and every portion of him is precise, slender and exotic. You've gone many places and many miles beside him.

He has a suit on today- it looks expensive and brand new- a silver watch chain hanging from his breast pocket. His collar is red, like the soft rich inside of a red velvet cake.

You smell cologne on him, something expensive and sultry. It's something he wears confidently. You wonder if he tucks drops on his neck.

If one would taste it on his skin.

You sit on the opposite side of his desk in an uncomfortable wooden chair, in his suede shadow.

"Carla."

"Yes?"

Something in you is rolling around, doing tumbles. It's usually not like this- but it's just today, tonight. Your birthday. He calls you by your first name, and you're allowed to call him Derek. You want to take that privilege home with you right now.

You know what you sound like saying it. This isn't a dream and you shouldn't be having these thoughts. You have to swallow everything down. Force it down.

"Do you think I'd let your birthday pass without event, Dr. Radames?"

"I-"

No you didn't. You didn't even mention it. He smiles, all thin lips- no teeth. He's celebrated your birthday with a few promising words about your success before. And it's endearing what he says.

"I am attending a dinner with a business partner. I believe you deserve a night off. Join me."

You're floored. You have to say yes. You can't refuse. Now is your chance.

"Of course."

It's not anything you haven't done with him before, but it's tonight. It's your big hurrah. You're going to wear red. You'll wear red lipstick- you'll…

"Go home, get changed."

"What time?"

"Seven?"

You hate to leave. You really do. There's a clipboard with your name as supervisor in the lab that begs you not to go. And maybe you should listen, but you don't want to. You don't want to at all.

"Alright, I'll see you at seven."

He laughs at your tone.

-o-

You rush home though your work plagues you. There's so much you needed to do today that's not going to be done. You're going to get hell for it and your productivity's going to plunge. You know this, but there's a voice in the swells of your anxiety that tells you that tells you that you might only have this one shot to… what are you going to do, really?

Confess your sins to a man much older than you? Tell him you've been dreaming about him?

You're really only doing this because you can and you want to. You want to know what he's like.

What it's like. And it's a perfect opportunity. In a few hours you're legally of age.

It's a good thing that he can't peel the skin off your skull and look into your head.

You still feel sick, but you pop a few Advil and drink juice straight from the week old carton to wash it down. Red tights- where were they, and where was that dress you bought?

Somewhere in your place. Probably in the closet, yes you wrapped it up in a plastic sleeve last week.

You dig through your room, shove cardboard boxes you still haven't bothered to unpack out of the way.

You pull that red dress over your body, and it doesn't even look like you anymore. It's snug on your hips, has curved folds, and is cut low and above your knobby knees. You have too many bruises on your legs from rolling in your sleep.

You bruise so easily.

You thumb that spot between your breasts. Does he like a thin girl? You can feel the bone of your ribcage.

There's no reason not to be confident. He can't resist that color and you know he loves it. He loves red upholstery (You've visited his estate), he loves when the secretary with her whining voice wears that cherry red lipstick you can't stand.

You caught him once playing with a tube of lipstick, tapping it on his desk, turning it over in his fingers.

You had never seen him so concerned before. Not even in the serious litigation brought up by a Senator Tyler last year.

The case was red, waxy, and still moist from someone's breath. You didn't smell perfume or any kind of scent that usually sat around from one of his cheap file keeps.

It had a butterfly on the reflective tube. You know because he left the room, and he left that behind.

And you took it.

You dab it on your lips, it was gently used and it's your war prize. You roll them with a pop, looming over your bathroom sink because you have such poor luck with makeup. Your sink's stained with powders and eyeliners from all your little games.

You've played pretend before, and it was always with him. You'd paint yourself perfect for him every time and dream.

You're surprised you even had lips like this. Red, pouty lips.

You look like a skinny little starlet with a candy apple smile. You've wondered who had this smile before you, and wondered what kind of woman pulls a man like Derek down, but it's yours now.

You smile at yourself, your pretty mask. It's a layer of dust over gray, and your eyes look like wet yellow buttons with lashes too big for your doll baby face.

-o-

You're quiet in the car, holding a plastic purse by its straps.

It takes an hour for the driver to tote you both to the place, and throughout that hour you sit behind the driver and are blasted numb by air-conditioning that carries the smell of the upholstery. From your seat you watch Derek in the passenger's position.

Or his profile. You can't see his face, even in the car mirrors- no you only see the summer sun bouncing off glass buildings and cars there. All you see is his jaw- the peppered hairs on the back of his skull.

He's not too terribly old, thirty something, but he looks in his handsome forties. He's someone who has done quite a bit in his time, and has to dye away the troubles and caulk his wrinkles for the sake of public appearances.

He smells as expensive as he is.

He leads you by the elbow, a spring to him, into Delecroix. It looks like every establishment worth their weight in salt, class carpeting from entrance to each corner, the ceilings low and dark. You brush by a waiter rushing with a platter of fish and he apologizes with an accent.

The dinners are lit with candle chandeliers and electric lights.

You feel warm.

"Derek."

You expected another man. You did not expect a woman.

Suddenly you're so awake you can feel the blood rushing to the back of your neck.

Derek sits you anyways, and he sits by a woman. She looks like she hatched out of one of the replica paintings rolled out along the wall.

"Hello."

You don't give Derek the moment to introduce you.

"Hello," she's looking at you with disinterest, distaste. Looks like she wasn't expecting someone else, and furthermore, she wasn't expecting someone with a penchant for red.

Derek doesn't seem to even notice the obvious boundary that had been crossed.

"Ahem. This is Dr. Carla Radames."

"Charmed."

She sounds like, and looks like she wants to leave, and it's appalling. Derek gestures, in that fluid way of his, to the woman draped in red and jewels, "This is Hua-Lin."

Chinese. Exotic.

"This isn't a meet and greet," she says, and you have to agree with her. This is disgusting.

The waiter cuts any conversation, and all three of you order- you pick a light steak, you pick it thick and rare.

And then the table is quiet and uncomfortable.

Hua eventually is chancing looks at you over her glass of water. You stare right back.

Derek plays with his ring and realizes very quickly that his guests are not in a festive mood.

"It's Dr. Radames's birthday."

"Oh really? And how old are you turning?"

You set your own water down, your lipstick is running, "Eighteen."

"_Eighteen_," and Hua's not talking with impress. She looks right at Derek, and you see him frown.

"-And already a PhD in her field."

Hua's red lips are puckered and it's not from the lemon floating in her drink. Your brain thumps hot in your head, and you don't know if you're glaring or not. You can't tell. How can she talk like and get away with her tongue?! Why would Derek invite you here with this… this unprofessional witch!

Your head hurts, it's stuffy and clogged, and things have not gone as you had hoped. You don't want to take your pills here- not with a few sets of eyes on you.

"Excuse me," you mutter, "I'll be right back."

You push the chair in and try to leave as little of yourself as possible behind to talk about.

You are sure that's what they start speaking of the moment you leave clutching your purse.

-o-

You're like a fish in the mirror, hovering over the sink and gagging. The pain in your head is pounding right down to your stomach and you're dry heaving air because you've got nothing in you. Somewhere between minutes of sipping water from your palms and popping a few painkillers, you feel this… uncomfortable anger. You see her in his office after hours in that leather chair.

You hear it squeaking in your head under them.

She probably slept with him; she probably had a piece of his bed and marked it.

You try sipping more water and taking another Advil.

"Oh boy."

Hua's watching you, or she has been watching you and you just haven't noticed. She's uncomfortably close in a few seconds, and stuffs her fingers into your purse. You swipe at her, and you swear, but she's slick, much slicker than you.

"Thought I recognized that color. Isn't a good look on you, Carla."

She's holding the tube of lipstick in front of your face- and you watch the rest of what you're wearing spindle down the drain with flecks of phlegm.

Drunkenly, you wonder if your throat is bleeding. Everything's red.

"Derek gave me that."

"Uh huh."

She didn't stop. She pulled out the honey colored bottles from the purse.

"You must be something," she says, and you can smell her over the stink of your own breath. She smells like sex, or what you thought sex should smell like. Like hot flesh and sugar- it's nauseating. You close your eyes and hold your breath to block it out.

Did you fall asleep-

"What's this?"

"What?"

"This."

She has an unmarked glass jar in your face, and it's half full of tiny capsules.

"I pegged you for a bad girl."

"Go away," you growl, "get off my things."

It's the most you've said the entire night.

Hua doesn't take anything of yours. She puts everything back where she found it but the lipstick.

"Just a fair warning, little girl," she says, and you stare at her heels, velvet black, "he isn't worth anybody's time."

"It's time for you to shut up," you snap, glory-less.

Hua walks off with her lipstick.

A few minutes later- it's as if the episodic sickness never happened. You're fit as a fiddle. It's as if you leave your whole body behind.

-o-

You come back to the table to steaming food and worried looks. Even from Hua- and you know she's acting now. You ignore her, and it seems as if the conversation was lighter since you left, because they're speaking about business while eating. Something about Raccoon- a hot topic. You melt into the background and spoon bloody steak into your mouth.

You don't know why your stomach doesn't bother you this time, and you don't want to argue.

Derek doesn't notice your lack of lipstick. But he notices you. He brings you into the conversation with suave little hooks and you proudly recount the attributes of your accomplishments that were public domain. You can see she's uncomfortable.

You hope it's because she's afraid- that this long, slender orient bitch is afraid of you and your teeth. You bite bits of steak and watch for her reactions.

It bleeds down your throat.

Eventually, Derek's phone buzzes, and he excuses himself as he always does.

Hua looks at you expectantly.

"Well?"

"Well?"

She doesn't need to ask "are you going to do it?"

It's startling. She's said absolutely nothing to Derek Simmons about the little girl carrying benzodiazepine pills in her purse. She's said absolutely nothing.

You have a feeling she sees into the back of your skull, through all the medications and the painkillers and all your personal monsters. She knows what you want, who you want, this... Hua. She's not going to stop you either.

You twist open the jar and wave your palm over the man's drink.

She smiles at you like you've just shared a secret.

"You hate him."

She flashes her teeth at you.

And you've won.

-o-

The steak is delicious. There's dessert- you order red velvet cake. You split it with Hua. Derek doesn't know what passed between you two. He's looking a little tired, he doesn't have an appetite for dessert, but he's watching the little furtive exchanges between you two. You realize, very quickly, that Hua's not such a nice girl either.

She asks you about your projects while Derek fights back what looks like a headache.

"So you think you've tamed that specific protein into a controlled element?"

"Of course," you say, and your head feels lighter than air, "and the application of that singular element in a repetitious manner? It stimulates an endless self-destruction to recreation pattern. The reanimation process in a simplified environment."

Feels like a dream.

You bite into the soft center of the cake and it melts on your tongue into bits of thick dough.

Hua picks bites off with a long-tined fork.

"Endless reconstruction."

She's like an echo in your head.

"Infinite metamorphosis, I call it."

Derek is sweating. He's switching from one leg to the other on which to cross. He's saying less, he's looking at both of you less.

It takes until the end of the cake for him to call it a night.

Hua is smiling the entire way out the door.

She looks like a demon by the time you're at the street, watching you under the lamplight.

Derek leans on your shoulder as you open the door for him. He's losing will by the step. The driver doesn't ask.

You look down the street to the door of Delacroix to find Hua, and you catch her long naked back as she walks herself into the streets. She doesn't care what happens to either of you.

But she hates Derek Simmons.

And you want him.

There's no disguising it, you want him. You want to consume him, worship him. You want to suck his silver tongue dry and have your name carved into every little crease of his memories.

He's given you everything.

So you have to thank her.

-o-

It's a quiet ride back. An hour, and by the end of it you're burning and anxious.

And Derek Simmons is leaning on you as you walk him to the laboratory building. He's hardly conscious. He's mumbling.

"Derek?"

You take him somewhere where no one on graveyard shift would look- upstairs, and you have the key. In the offices reserved for paper pushing and desk jobs. File cabinets, a sparse couch. He falls like a flimsy tower into the couch, bumps the water cooler.

Derek Simmons has the twitches and the shakes. His face is red, his perfect suit's a little mussed. You don't even know where to start. How to start. No one is around.

No one would be around.

Your fingers shake, you reach for his face. He's bristly and clean. And he doesn't protest. He doesn't say anything, he just pants for feverish air.

So you touch him.

You can't help it- he's beautiful. He's yours- and tonight proved it.

Right?

"Derek."

He mumbles something.

"Derek, would you..."

You're shaking.

You don't want to ask.

"Derek- would you have sex with me?"

"Ada?"

"Sorry?"

_Who_?

You ask again. He looks at you and doesn't see you. He sees right past you.

"Ada..."

"I'm..."

Angry. You're angry. But, perhaps...

"Yes, It's Ada."

The look on his face.

You hold it in your hands. You shake because it's the look of a tortured man, a broken, weeping man and you want to hold onto it.

You kiss him, and he fumbles with your mouth- red.

It's not enough. It's nothing like you imagined.

"It's Ada," you hiss, and you kiss him again. You chase the dragon with his lips and you crawl onto his lap. You burn.

You don't care who Ada is.

You just know she makes him kiss for you. And that's fine by you. It's all yours and it's all for you.

You kiss him into the wall. He's too weak to protest. You love it. You love it and you keep goading his drunken self, his poor desperate self and there's a sick pleasure in tearing into him each time. In feeling wet and violent, like you're a cannibal to him.

It's not enough.

But he falls limp and you chill, "Derek?"

You shiver. He does not.

Reality.

-o-

You wake up and it's not your birthday.

It's two days after.

Hospital machines beep at you as if they're laughing.

Your head hurts.

A nurse peels back a paper curtain and tells you you collapsed at Delacroix. That your medication had interacted with the painkillers you were shoving down your throat.

You stare at the ceiling but nothing's any clearer.

You don't know what happened, you're appalled and you're sweaty.

And you wonder if it was a dream.


End file.
